I spent Wednesday high above the clouds, traveling home from four days in Mexico City with our travel buddies, Karen and Kendall. It wasn’t until I saw a politician with a smudged forehead on an airport television that I realized it was Ash Wednesday.
Though I’m late to the liturgical calendar, always playing catch-up, I’ve come to appreciate the rhythm it invites. Even still, year after year, I find myself unprepared, my forehead left conspicuously clean.
Our re-entry yesterday was as shocking as ever. Life hits especially hard in March. (She says every month…) Cory and I both spent all day playing a different sort of catch-up. Amid piles of laundry and reintroducing groceries to our home, we had deadlines and responsibilities to answer for. In less than 24 hours, our sunny, blissed-out vacation already felt like a dream.1
We reside in this tension - rush and rest, reality and recovery. But I’m starting to believe what feels like whiplash is its own, steady beat. When we know to expect both the pressure and the pause, we can settle into a rhythm and move in its flow.
This is me, playing catch-up in real time, knowing in my bones that life doesn’t wait to be caught as much as noticed. No matter where we are or what life looks like, regardless of how we feel - ready-or-not - this is the season of Lent. It asks nothing of us except surrender.
For me, in this moment, surrender looks like acknowledgement and the simplest intention. I have three books set aside which I plan to pick through in the coming weeks. If you’ve been here for a while, you might anticipate the first, my treasured City of God by Sara Miles.
Flipping through the first two chapters today, I landed on this passage about Ash Wednesday’s theme of repentance, “Repentance means turning toward other human beings, our own flesh and blood, whenever they’re oppressed, hungry, or imprisoned; it means acting with compassion instead of indifference. It means turning away, ‘fasting,’ from any of the little and big things that can keep us from God - drugs, religion, busy-ness, video games, lies - and accepting the divine embrace with all our hearts. Repentance requires paying attention to others, and learning to love, even a little bit, what God loves so much: the whole screwed-up world, this holy city, the people God created to be his own.”
The good news: repentance is always on time.
The bad news: it requires the deep work of attention and honesty.
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